I just ran upon a three part series of blog posts about Linux and Windows in the workplace. No, not our world, but it is more of the mainstream real world.
Well written, and good reading.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
I used to just plunk around with various flavors of Linux, sending off for CDs with the program, and installed them on "throw away" computers that I brought down to Mexico for school children that we had gotten to know on a school rehab program my Ex had started.... These were all old machines that were unable to run anything beyond 3.1 but amazingly they worked just fine with Linux, and in later years Ubuntu.
Now it is quite simple to download an install CD, burn it, and try it out without effecting your Windows or Mac hard drive at all, actually running on the CD... but CDs run slow so a real install is doable, and is it quite simple to set up a Dual Boot system without damaging your work machine... or just us that old POS in the garage that simply won't start up anymore, all you need is something modern enough to have CD drive.
I no longer recommend the later versions of Ubuntu as it requires too much horsepower with the modern Bling, but 8.04 is still available and does everything with little user effort.
I recently "upgraded" to Ubuntu 11.04, had a horrible experience. It is obviously not ready for general use and is very buggy. I then used Mint11 after Randy Rain mentioned it here but was discouraged with the embedded Google adds and hampered search features. Currently use Pinguy and am quite happy, first for the warm and friendly folk in the Pinguy user forum, and now because of the power and snappy performance.
OOPS! my soap box just broke, looking for some pain meds...
Have a happy and safe 4th of July!
But Windows 7 is such a great operating system!
Ubuntu 11.04 - "not ready for prime time". I'm sticking with 10.10 or 10.04 for my non-business computers.
It doesn't like my Nvidia video cards at all. Even the 2D version is broken.
Mint10 seems to be ok but takes a little getting used to after Ubuntu but I haven't tried ver 11 yet. I haven't noticed any ads in Mint10.
Oh how I hope you are being so very sarcastic 😛
(win 7 just being the next version of win xp except with more security which gets in my way)
Yes and it gives you an incentive to quadruple your RAM which you always wanted to do anyway!
I particularly like the hidden and buried permissions spread throughout it like a cancer.
Yes, 11.04 has made install worthless, was able to boot to guide after a workaround and now click only. If they could get nvidia drivers sorted they would be better off, till then it's live cd to access those files and valuing to play with it.
> Yes, 11.04 has made install worthless, was able to boot to guide after a workaround and now click only. If they could get nvidia drivers sorted they would be better off, till then it's live cd to access those files and valuing to play with it.
Bummer!
yes, Ubuntu 11.04 lunched my system also... not the W7 install, or my play area, it only killed it's own system.
I had gotten complacent with the quality of Ubuntu and trusted the update manager to do an "upgrade" rather than a fresh install of the OS. I was so wrong! Conacal is slowly killing Ubuntu, very sad.
Mint struggled with my Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M GPU, Pinguy has no issues at all and runs circles around W7.
Since you already have the tools, you can recover all the true data, just the operating program is effed up. Copy your data onto a external drive and do a fresh install in the same area, then copy your data back.
Someone, some day, said I should create separate swap, /home and / (root) partitions and that saved my bacon. A fresh install formatting / and assigning /home (but not formatting) works swell, a new OS, same data and all your settings are back including Thunderbird mail and Firefox add ons. Don't do that with the mess U11.04 made, the settings are lunched too. Just copy the regular data, not the hidden files and folders.
This is what my current scheme looks like, it works quite well.
The unlabeled 30.44 gb is /home and 4.89 is / for my play area, it now has Mint11 on it, but I default boot to Pinguy. Both share the swap partition.
The 250.43 is data only (ext4 file system for indexing and efficiency), the second hard drive is total backup of all including windows.
Because Windows can not see anything but NTFS and FAT I have most all data copied to the Windows partition also in a separate directory. (Easy access to all partitions and data in Linux.)
BTW: this is a stock Sager NP8170 laptop. It works exactly the same on my old HP. The old Dell throw away?.. Windows crashes and won't run on it at all.
Will have to try it. I cannot stand narwhal. Only thing I REALLY miss in Linux is my ipod. But I have my macbook so I can run it from there. I find myself using the mac more and more because Ubuntu is horrible with the "new" fixes they added.
I must have about 6 or 7 disc sets of Slackware. One of the originals, advertised as most "unix like". I used to bounce between Windows 98 and Slackware but I haven't tried it with XP.
Sooo... as surveyors, what do the Linux users do for COGO, CAD, for downloading/processing field data, et cetera?
Thanks for that, I have ubuntu on it's own hard drive but am waiting to upgrade the motherboard so I can add a 3rd internal hdd. I thought about recovering that way but have been putting it off as there is so much data to partition then make room for more stuff.
BricsCAD has a linux version of their intellicad. Haven't done any surveying since switching, so not sure about cogo. I would suspect you can run WolfPack in wine, but am unsure.
Well, with WINE you are going back to Windows via the emulator...
I'm sadly not aware of any LINUX-only solutions for all surveying needs - worst case, one could always run a Windows VM inside a Linux-hosted VirtualBox instance.
a lot of help can be found here: http://forum.pinguyos.com/member.php?action=register&referrer=1385
> Well, with WINE you are going back to Windows via the emulator...
>
> I'm sadly not aware of any LINUX-only solutions for all surveying needs - worst case, one could always run a Windows VM inside a Linux-hosted VirtualBox instance.
No, you go back to software written for windows. You still are not running Microsoft's Windoze inoperable system. Remember, wine does not do any CPU emulation. This is why they say "Wine Is Not an Emulator?. To me, the biggest plus to using Linux is that it is not giving money to Bill Gates. That is why I would not run a virtual machine running Windoze, you would have to purchase a copy of MS. And I just cannot bring myself to do that. Linux free. Apple OS X, $30. Windoze, $100+. That is just crazy.
Thanks for the link, I am burning the disc right now and have made a partition to play with it!
Just have to say, got it installed quick and love this distro so far! Thank you for sharing.
I thought about trying to put Sitecomp on a Linux machine but never got anywhere. I didn't really know what I was doing and never got started. The original Sitecomp used to run in HP-UX, up to version 11 I think. It was better than the last version for windows I used, five or six years ago.
:good:
Terramodel runs very nicely under WINE, but I could not figure out how to run the usb hardware lock (Rainbow Sentinel) so only got the most basic functions. None of the locked modules would work.
If that problem were solved, I'd probably switch nearly everything to Linux.
